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Buy Reviews on Yelp, Get Black Mark

SAN FRANCISCO — Businesses caught soliciting favorable reviews are increasingly running the risk of getting slapped with a badge of shame.

Like every Web site that depends on consumer critiques, Yelp has a problem with companies trying to manipulate their results. So it set up a sting operation to catch them. The first eight businesses — including a moving company, two repair shops and a concern that organizes treasure hunts — will find themselves exposed on Thursday.

For the next three months, their Yelp profile pages will feature a “consumer alert” that says: “We caught someone red-handed trying to buy reviews for this business.”

Potential customers will see the incriminating e-mails trying to hire a reviewer.

“The bigger Yelp gets, the more incentive there is to game the system,” said Eric Singley, its vice president for consumer products and mobile. “These notices are the next step in protecting consumers.”

Yelp has more than 30 million reviews. For every five new notices that are submitted, one is determined by internal filters to be so dubious — either highly favorable or highly critical — that it is banned to a secondary page, which few users bother with, instead of appearing on the business’s profile page. Many of the reviews tagged as fake are written by people new to Yelp.

To have the best shot at getting a solicited review onto a profile page, a sneaky business needs to find someone with a track record on the site, whom Yelp has called an “elite” reviewer. It does this by advertising on classified sites like Craigslist.

That was where Yelp went to conduct its sting. A Yelp employee posed as an elite reviewer and got the businesses to reveal themselves. The size of the promised payments varied widely, and so did the work required.

A pest control company offered $5 to anyone who would post a review that the business itself had written. The moving company was willing to pay $50 but wanted original copy. An appliance repair shop provided a start: “I really appreciate that the service tech was on time, the problem was solved, everything was cleaned up and he was very professional. Please add 50 or more words,” the shop suggested. It would pay $30.

The highest payment was offered by a jewelry store in San Diego, which said it was forced to solicit reviews after others got away with doing it. “We have noticed that some of our larger, corporate run competitors have been unfairly trying to get reviews written for them on Yelp, which puts us at a disadvantage,” wrote Bert Levi of Levi Family Jewelers. He said he would pay $200 for a review of a new custom-designed ring.

Asked Wednesday for his side of the episode, Mr. Levi said, “I need to talk to my lawyer.”

Jessica Hernandez, a proprietor of a Chicago hair salon, was more vocal. Yelp said it had caught her salon, Mirror Mirror, offering $10 to complete this tribute: “You want to write about how you visited Chicago and wanted to get your hair colored and cut for a date you flew out to meet with. You ended up loving it. You happened to walk by and walked in and was serviced instantly. Feel free to add great details of your own.”

Ms. Hernandez said she knew nothing about any efforts to buy a review, but had some harsh words for Yelp. The site had been so aggressive in seeking advertising from her, “if I could physically put a restraining order on them, I would. As God is my witness, they literally would call every 15 minutes. I put a block on my phone.”

She said she doubted the beware notice would have an effect. “People are kind of wary about what they read these days, and hopefully they’re smart enough to know better,” she said.

In one case, the business is already gone. La Pomme, a Manhattan nightclub that Yelp said it had caught in a sting in April, closed shortly afterward. A spokeswoman for the club that replaced it said she could not confirm anything that might have happened in the spring.

Considering the volume of fake reviews, putting a spotlight on eight businesses is only a modest crackdown. “It is safe to say this is just a sample” of businesses soliciting reviews, said Mr. Singley of Yelp.

Myle Ott, a doctoral candidate in computer science at Cornell who has researched the rates of deception across various review communities, including Yelp, said public notices were a warning that businesses might well heed.

“My intuition is that public shaming would increase the risk and therefore the cost of posting fake reviews, which could reduce the prevalence,” he said. But he also had what he called a “more sinister” thought: “What’s to stop someone from going and soliciting fake positive reviews for a competitor’s restaurant, in order for them to be publicly shamed?”

A version of this article appears in print on October 18, 2012, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Buy Reviews On Yelp, Get Black Mark. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe